Rex Smith: Schools for America's lucky girls

Updated 1:02 pm, Monday, May 19, 2014

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Photo illustration by Jeff Boyer / Times Union

Photo illustration by Jeff Boyer / Times Union

Rex Smith: Schools for America's lucky girls

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As fireworks burst overhead, and amid a sea of alumnae and parents gathered on the campus of Emma Willard School in Troy last Saturday night, almost 300 teenaged girls were dashing happily toward the front of the crowd. They were joining spontaneously to sing the alma mater at the end of a spectacular show celebrating their school's bicentennial.

Their treble voices lightly swept through the gathering, creating a magical moment of polyphonic sound. Yet it was hard not to contrast their innocent joy with the terror that remained the reality that night for 223 other girls their age halfway around the world.

What if, I wondered, virtually the entire student body of the school had been kidnapped by brutal thugs whose goal was specifically to stop their learning? As a confetti of red and white exploded in the sky, I caught a glimpse of my daughter against the silhouette of a Gothic tower. I wondered: What must the parents of the girls from the Chibok school in Nigeria be thinking about their decision to give their daughters the opportunity that arises from education?

It has been more than a month since 276 girls were taken captive (53 later escaped) by the Islamist gang known as Boko Haram. Its name, loosely translated from the local Hausa language, means "Western education is forbidden." The Boko Haram have been attacking schools in northern Nigeria for years, believing the Quran instructs that non-Islamic education is evil. (By the way, no Muslim I know agrees with this reading of Islamic scripture.)

Most of us in the West had been unaware of Boko Haram until this attack. Maybe it's because the government of Nigeria, which boasts Africa's biggest energy production yet has the continent's most inequitable distribution of wealth, has kept it less visible by all but ignoring years of attacks. For Nigeria's ruling elite, education isn't a priority — especially not the education of girls. The kidnappings disrupted the narrative of progress spun by the corrupt government of President Goodluck Jonathan.

If we sometimes forget the vast array of privileges that accrue to us as Americans, the playing out of such episodes as the Nigerian kidnappings can introduce us to reality. Sometimes the world seems so small: The skyline of Lagos, the largest city in Nigeria, is as modern as any in the world, and it's not unusual to see Western logos on the clothing worn by youngsters on its streets.

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Rex Smith is editor of the Times Union. Share your thoughts at http://blog.timesunion.com/editors.

But here we sit in a community where this month we are celebrating 200 years of all-girls education at not one, but two fine schools — Emma Willard and Albany Academy for Girls. My daughter has attended both remarkable institutions; she is a very lucky girl.

We don't have to worry in America that a religious fanatic is going to assemble an army of murderers and arsonists to stop these girls from learning the accumulated knowledge of history's best minds. While there remains a lively segment of anti-intellectualism in our country, it mostly yields just bad policy decisions wrought by election-season pandering. We can live with that. Global warming deniers aren't murderous.

Which is not to say that there are no serious concerns for the girls in American schools today. For example: While they don't have to worry about the right to learn, there remains a question about their capacity to earn: Women still take home 84 cents to every dollar paid to men in this country.

That's an improvement from the 36 percent divide in 1980, but the gap has barely narrowed since the 1990s.

Most workplaces still haven't adapted to the reality of working women's lives — or, in fact, to the needs of the whole person of both women and men. A balance of work and family life isn't just important for workers' personal fulfillment; it's necessary if we want all children to have adequate parental guidance. America either needs to make childcare affordable, as it is in most European and some Asian countries, or adjust workplace expectations to better support parenting.

Yet while the workplaces our children will enter should concern American parents, focusing on such issues feels almost self-indulgent alongside the reality of girls' lives in so many corners of the world. Malala Yousafzai was 15 when the Taliban shot her in the head on her school bus in Pakistan's Swat Valley because of her activism, starting at age 11, for girls' education. You wonder if the girls of Chibok knew of her; maybe her story is giving them hope right now.

We hold these imperiled girls in our hearts even as we celebrate the opportunities available to American kids, and work to assure that they might have even more. Our kids are fortunate, and so are we, as the kidnappings of Chibok remind us.